News about our books, authors, and more.

At the dawn of the twentieth century it had become "established hearsay" that facial hair was fertile breeding ground for infectious organisms, particularly tuberculosis. The stubble we may now take for granted was once under a volley of attacks from legislators and public health activists who feared that beards and moustaches were unhygienic and pathogen-laden health hazards.

Facial hair has since been exonerated, but in honor of No Shave November we delve into the history of the unjustly libeled moustache (or the facial hair formerly known as "capillary microbe-carriers") with this excerpt from Steven Cassedy’s forthcoming book, Connected:

For more from Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century read the first chapter here or read the book's description on sup.org.

ELLE UK launched a controversial project this month; editors tapped three ad agencies and three feminist organizations to form an unlikely task force. Their goal? To “re-brand a term that many feel has become burdened with complications and negativity.” That word? Feminist.

The fruits of this collaboration are on newsstands now, the feminist-themed November issue featuring glossy, full-page ads for feminism. Glib, eye-catching and meme-ready, these graphics dispatch with anti-feminist stereotypes, challenge the gender wage gap, and tackle the stigmas associated with the contentious “F” word. The question ELLE poses, “Does feminism need re-branding?” has elicited upward of 80 million tweets and counting.

Interestingly, what ELLE UK is doing today—attempting to refresh the feminist image as a mainstream mainstay is not unprecedented. In the early 1900s, the first women’s photographic magazine in France, Femina (a forerunner of ELLE) took on a similar mission. Working against the bicycle-riding, cigarette-smoking, pants-wearing caricature of the oft-derided New Woman, Femina promised in its very first issue (February 1901) to steer clear of any talk of emancipation or women’s rights, for fear of “masculinizing women and robbing them of their exquisite charm.”

Instead, their publication, dedicated to women's “vast and magnificent domain,” showed female achievement in multiple—and always lovely—new iterations. From corseted “sportswomen” to well-robed lawyers, dashing doctoresses and impossibly elegant writers, these were new women in everything but name and, perhaps, attire. Femina enabled the celebration of multiple new forms of women’s achievement, while skirting around the New Woman label—and, at the same time, made those achievements visible and desirable to huge numbers of women through the powerful engine of the mass press (see this Slate article for examples of Femina's modern women icons).

Through their regular opinion surveys, expert debates, and writing contests, Femina built an enormous community of engaged women readers who were taught not just to admire the women celebrated by the magazine, but to imitate them. Look at this fabulous woman writer/lawyer/doctor/tennis player, the editors would urge—and don’t you, dear reader, see a little bit of yourself in her? The tens of thousands of responses they would receive for their surveys and contests (on everything from “would you rather be a man” to “what’s the best profession for women”) are roughly analogous to the 80 million tweets hashtagged to ELLE’s debate. Through their strategic “rebranding,” both magazines, a century apart from one another, have managed to get an impressive number of women talking to each other about what they can achieve.

So how does ELLE UK's campaign measure up to Femina's embrace of the achieving modern woman?

Despite their promotion of myriad images of female success, Femina’s ideal remained fairly restricted: the ideal modern woman balanced femininity and feminism, equality with conventional notions of femininity. Images of women at work were juxtaposed with women holding babies: work-life balance necessitated a careful equilibrium, and the constant proof that professional success would not jeopardize family life or traditional feminine ideals.

ELLE, by contrast, is less concerned with mediating feminist ideals with the assurance that traditional feminine norms ought to endure. While the rebrand is launched via a fashion magazine, squeezed between pages of unfathomably lean models wearing outlandishly priced clothing, ELLE’s mission still seems less limiting than its forebears (like Femina) or more recent precursor stunts (like Dove’s Real Beauty campaign). ELLE’s message seems to be that feminists can be beautiful, even if they don’t have to be; this feminism is about choice.

“I want every version of a woman and a man to be possible,” actress Natalie Portman declares in the magazine. Editor-in-chief Lorrain Candy echoes her sentiment: “Women should have the freedom to be themselves without box-ticking.” ELLE’s expansion of the feminist umbrella far surpasses Femina’s analogous mission 100 years prior.

In fact, despite the provocation of rebranding, ELLE’s message turns out to be less about the feminist label, and more about expanding and projecting women’s voices (e.g. their “ask him what he makes” campaign); it’s connected to a new speak-up-and-stand-up-for-yourself feminism that we are seeing in everything from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In to Tina Fey’s Bossypants (my personal favorite work of recent feminist criticism), who, like Portman, are not afraid of the “F” word. But celebrity feminists are not enough, as both both Femina and ELLE realized. You also need to give women a means through which they can lean in themselves, and make their own voices heard. And that, dear reader, is worth tweeting about.

What are we thankful for? Our readers, of course! During this Thanksgiving season we want to share our gratitude by offering a limited time 30% discount on all of our Fall 2013 titles. Starting today and lasting through the end of November we’ll knock 30% off the list price for cloth, paper and ebook versions of any and all books from our latest catalog.

So how can you take advantage of this deal?

Step 1) Peruse the Fall catalog and see if anything strikes your fancy. If a book (or books) catches your eye, head over to sup.org, search for the title or author you’re interested in and pull up the book’s page on our site.

Step 2) Click “Buy This Book,” select your preferred format from the drop down menu (cloth, paper or ebook) and enter this promo code: TGIVING13(all caps) into the promo code box. Add your purchase to the cart and watch the discount kick in (that's the best part). Then you're ready to checkout.

Step 3) Sit back, wait for your book to be shipped and enjoy!

Thanks for reading and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Note:

*Not all books from the 2013 catalog are in bookstores yet, but they are available for pre-order and the discount still applies.

**The discount does not apply to bundle packages (ex. cloth and ebook or paper and ebook)

***If you have any questions we’re happy to clarify and troubleshoot. Send queries to kcaetano@stanford.edu

Stanford University Press is excited to announce the new editors for our series Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture:

David Biale & Sarah Abrevaya Stein

David and Sarah bring wide-ranging and wonderfully complementary expertise in Jewish Studies to their new posts. Through their own scholarship, they have demonstrated a commitment to a broadly comparative approach to Jewish Studies, bringing the field into productive dialogue with the newest concepts and methods in the historical discipline. David and Sarah will bring this approach to the series to publish books that speak compellingly to a wide audience of scholars and students.

As many of you are aware, Aron Rodrigue and Steven Zipperstein recently stepped down as series editors after two decades of service. Since the inception of the series Steve and Aron have been essential in establishing the series as a home for the finest scholarship on Jewish history and culture. The series published some eighty books under their direction and received numerous awards and accolades.

We are confident that Sarah and David will continue this legacy and will usher in projects that will make long-lasting contributions to scholarship. Stanford University Press is eager to collaborate with them on innovative, ambitious, and influential publications. We extend to them a warm and enthusiastic welcome and hope you will do so as well.

David Biale is the Emmanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis and the Director of the Davis Humanities Institute. His research interests center on Jewish intellectual and cultural history, European intellectual history, and the history of religion. He is the author or editor of ten books, three of which have won National Jewish Book Awards. He currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Jewish Studies for the Oxford Bibliographies online, editor of the Norton Anthology of the World Religions: Judaism, and project director of a multi-author work on the history of Hasidism.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Professor of History and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies, as well as Vice Chair for Undergraduate Affairs of the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her scholarship explores Jewish cultural diversity in the modern period, ranging across the British and French imperial, Russian, American, Ottoman and wide Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and North African settings. She is the author of two award-winning solo-authored books and co-editor of two publications in Stanford's Jewish Studies series: A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Landino Memoir of Sa'adi Besalal a-Levi (co-edited with Aron Rodrigue, 2012) and Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950 (co-edited with Julia Philips Cohen, 2014). A third book, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, will be published in 2014 with University of Chicago Press.

Above: an aerial view of Typhoon Haiyan from NASA; Below: US Marines providing disaster relief in the Philippines

One week ago today, Typhoon Haiyan slammed into the Philippine Islands at Guiuan. Packing winds of greater than 190 mph, the storm was the strongest typhoon to make landfall. Whole towns were leveled, trees flattened, and families displaced. Now, those residents must prepare for the next storm, an onslaught of aid and donations to provide relief and help them rebuild.

We’ve seen this before, most recently in Haiti after the destructive earthquake of 2010. Aid money and western aid workers flowed into the country at an unprecedented pace. Attempts to provide long term help and reconstruction suffered as the amount of capital outstripped the ability of local human capital to wisely direct that aid in ways that benefited Haitians over the long term. Even the most well-meaning and competent organizations have struggled to make investments that bettered the lot of Haitians, not just immediately, but well into the future.

Providing food, water, and short term shelter are all worthy goals; however, aid providers often feel it’s their responsibility to make sure those they assist get fed, clothed, and sheltered. This is particularly true in rebuilding houses, churches, schools, and other structures. Well-meaning “field trips” drop in to a community and rebuild structures for people. They build houses or schools and present them to people as gifts and testaments of their generosity.

Relief work, when done poorly, fills people’s stomachs but empties their stocks of self-reliance. The mindset of self-reliance comes from three beliefs and attitudes: the moral responsibility individuals feel to provide for their own well-being, the self-efficacy to do the things required to enhance well-being, and a long term view that directs and sequences action in ways that improve a person’s long term status.

What aid providers fail to do is include the recipients in meaningful roles, other than as passive acceptors of the givers’ benevolence. The afflicted aren’t asked to help—and consequently take responsibility for—their own structures. They fail to learn many new skills that would help build a house as well as a career, such as carpentry, plumbing, or project management. Little thought is given to the long-term ramifications of all the short term donor largesse.

How can we avoid the same mistakes this time around? By making sure that programs and interventions focus aid and efforts on building self-reliance. Then, and only then, can we harness the devastation of Haiyan and turn it into real developmental energy for the impoverished citizens of that beautiful region.

For more information on self-reliance and how it works as an economic and a social concept check out this quick video:

Paul C. Godfrey is Professor of Strategy and Associate Academic Director of the Melvin J. Ballard Center for Economic Self-Reliance at Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management, where he helps students and practitioners translate organization and economic theory into action that reduces poverty. He has recently pursued projects in Ghana, the Navajo Nation, and with disadvantaged populations in the United States.

His new book More than Money is a timely guide on how organizations can create prosperity for people at the base of the pyramid in the developing and developed world.

Anthropologist Diana Allan imbedded herself in a Palestinian refugee camp to document the lives of those struggling to survive in the geopolitical limbo of Beirut: “The results are stark and troubling,” says Kirkus Reviews.

Mary Hegland was the only academic from the United States on the ground in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. This is her account of how one small village weathered the metamorphosis that profoundly changed a nation.

In 1978 President Jimmy Carter proclaimed University Press Week to “honor the important role of university presses in advancing and preserving knowledge.” This year marks the second annual celebration of UP Week, coordinated by the American Association of University Presses (of which SUP is a proud and founding member!)

Yesterday our director, Alan Harvey, penned his thoughts on the future of scholarly communication. Stay tuned and to check the other university press blogs this week. Join us again on Friday for a virtual shindig on Innovation in Scholarly Publishing and follow the hashtag #upweek for more news and events.

New faces at SUP

We added two new faces to SUP this month:

Laura Kenney is the newest face to our production team. She inherited the reins from the newly retired, Judith Hibbard, who will be much missed at SUP.

Friederike Sundaram will work as an assistant editor in literary studies, philosophy and theology. She comes to us from Germany, where she previously worked with the inimitable Suhrkamp Verlag, and is currently pursuing a PhD in English Literature from the Free University of Berlin.

We're celebrating University Press Week with a 37-press blog tour. Weclome to Day 2 of the tour and to the SUP blog. Today's topic is the Future of Scholarly Communication and we're kicking the mic over to Alan Harvey, our Director. Enjoy!

In the past, publishing occupied a central role in scholarly communication. It was the primary means, outside of conferences and workshops, for the broad circulation of ideas. But more than that: it lent authority to those communications through peer review and the filtering process of the publishing ecosystem. Its reach was such that book and journal publication became the measure of performance for the academic community. I don’t feel I am breaking new ground by stating that this shouldn’t be the case today. This is widely known, and widely discussed, and yet we are still some way from it being a reality.

Technology has dramatically altered the communications landscape in all areas of our daily lives, both personal and professional. Speed often trumps validation in almost all sectors, from text messages to Twitter feeds. You see plenty of experimentation at university presses, with much of it being on display this University Press Week. There are even efforts to extend the traditional format, such as MIT’s collaboration with the Vectors journal, Rotunda at the University of Virginia Press, and even our own Stanford Briefs. But, at the risk of touching scholarly publishing’s third rail, only a few of these efforts are likely to feed back into the tenure and promotion cases of their authors or creators.

University presses (with notable exceptions) occupy a financial no-man’s land within their host institutions, required to break even or supported by carefully controlled subsidies. And yet our core mission, the dissemination of scholarship in its broadest sense, remains. A quick Google search for “university press mission” will bring up countless examples of our worthy mission statements, and most of us follow them, regardless of the financial consequences. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the credentialing process of tenure monographs. We continue to pursue other funding methods, such as Stanford University Press’ Authors Fund, but these may be short-term fixes for a broken system.

So with these issues nipping at our heels, what do I see as the future of scholarly communication?

Let me start with Joe Esposito’s post on Scholarly Kitchen last week about a Web-Scale University Press. Much of what Joe suggests is already being offered, with social media links on almost all press web sites, and free content either directly from the press itself, Google, Amazon, or other vendors. Stanford and others have been experimenting with retail options such as rental, bundling, and free giveaways. But, as Joe admits, there isn’t a business model for giving it all away for free, and that seems to be what is expected in the current climate. The simplest logic leads inexorably to the conclusion that we shouldn’t have a business model. Wouldn’t that be the best implementation of our mission? As Peter Berkery, AAUP’s Executive Director, was quoted in the Economist: “No one asks the chemistry department to be profitable.”

The academic conversation no longer plays out entirely through the pages of books and journals. It now lives in Twitter feeds and blogs, in collaborative documents, global workgroups, and open access repositories. These unmediated communications have allowed an entirely new research methodology to evolve, one unconnected to traditional print-based publishing (and let me be clear that the vast majority of current digital publishing is merely a mirror of print). This does not represent the majority of scholarship, but its impact is being felt everywhere, and new publication and communication processes must evolve to satisfy it – the alternative is a highly fragmented ecosystem in which adjacent parts do not correspond.

I believe this future of peer to peer scholarly communication will only come about through a great deal of collaboration. Primary amongst these will be collaborations between libraries and presses. Many presses, Stanford included, are already departments of the library, allowing us to share ideas, projects, and resources. The traditional publishing model with the library as the de facto funder of the press through content sales, pits the interests of the library against those of the press. While sustainable in the past, we need a new sense of joint ownership of the communication enterprise. We have already seen much discussion of library-press partnerships, and I feel certain we will see more in the near future.

But this is a very inward-looking picture of scholarly communication. What about broadening the audience? University presses have become highly skilled in aiding our authors to refine and shape their message for a general audience, and many believe we can take this effort further. I take great pride in the ability of Stanford University Press’s acquisitions and production editors to work with our authors to tighten their argument, broaden their focus, and otherwise develop their manuscript. The democratizing effect of technology has aided presses in recent years, allowing us to bring the academic conversation into the public sphere through a wide range of delivery platforms. This is a core part of every university’s mission, but this service cannot be for free.

This is an exciting time to be working in scholarly publishing. There are many challenges, but so many more opportunities. It may take a while for us to find the best model for the future press, but the spirit of experimentation I see around me tells me we’ll have an interesting and productive time looking for it.

Alan Harvey is the Director of Stanford University Press. He came to the press in 2002 and continues to serve as the resident expert in all things digital.

This week we asked our Facebook and Twitter audiences, What Is a Classic? sampling insights from literarycelebrities along the way.

Longevity of the text, universal relevance of content, potential to catalyze human enrichment, and collective social advancement, were all proffered by these august authors and critics as reasonable items on any canon-worthy checklist.

But as profound as these insights may be, the question of classics, of what qualifies as capital-“L” Literature, is one inevitably bogged down in the quagmire of subjectivity. What to one person is a font of inexhaustible wisdom, to another may appear to be nothing more than obvious moralizing drivel. So perhaps the question of what is not nearly as useful as who: Who decides what’s classic?

Don’t let Ankhi Mukherjee’s title mislead you: though the book’s cover asks What Is a Classic?, its contents are just as concerned with who is speaking as it is with what is spoken.

Mukherjee’s concise prose doesn’t pull any punches. In her first chapter she asserts that the “classic” can be deployed as a hierarchical apparatus, shoring up power for some while marginalizing the voices of others:

The canon has historically been a nexus of power and knowledge that reinforces hierarchies and the vested interests of select institutions, excluding the interests and accomplishments of minorities, popular and demotic culture, or non-European civilizations. (p. 9)

Lest we assume that this argument is responding to bygone colonial attitudes, Mukherjee swiftly cuts to a recent (and mildly apoplectic) public battle over a Penguin anthology of American poetry. In 2011, one poet and one critic squared off over whether or not the Penguin collection leniently curated minority poets regardless of their literary merit. Implicit accusations of racism and other character attacks were volleyed back and forth in the pages of the The New York Review of Books. Peter Monaghan, writing for The Huffington Post, described the dispute as “Bloodletting Over an Anthology.”

What this anthology-debacle makes plain—and what Mukherjee highlights in her book—is that inducting new texts into the literary canon (like, say Morrissey's Autobiography) is a profoundly political act which confers or, perhaps more importantly, withholds cultural and scholarly legitimation.

What’s more, today’s rapidly globalizing world sets the stage for an ever-increasingly multicultural and transnational artistic community. Today’s writers (and tomorrow’s classics) perhaps strike a greater dissonance now, more than ever, with the pejoratively-touted “dead white guy”-canon of yore. Mukherjee sees this as an apt entry point into a “postcolonial rewriting”—unique in both scope and historical depth—that demands revision of static definitions in favor of something more befitting of the 21st Century.

The erudite Alan Harvey, Director of Stanford University Press, poses this question during my job interview. To my ears, the question sounds nearly as chiding in his English accent, asked in earnest, as it did when I asked it of myself a week ago, after moving to Silicon Valley.

Here’s the context: I’m applying for a job with the Press, which Alan describes as one of the few remaining publishing houses in a state whose dot-com bubble gutted the industry of much of its human capital before subsequently bursting. He points something else out to me, something of which I am already acutely aware: I hail from an unlikely but robust mini-mecca of indie publishing: the Twin Cities. So, why would I—a newly minted English major—move to a valley so tech-oriented that it takes its handle from the computer chip?

This is the usual tension of tech versus text, is it not? The trope has been so frequently deployed so as to be a cliché at this point. Journalists and Op-Ed columnists publicly dissecting the utility of print culture at the dawn of a digital age would have you believe that conventional books, academic dissertations, the humanities and liberal arts studies are rendered obsolete in a world where binary code surpasses the alphabet as the most common way of transcribing our communications and nuance and complexity are sacrificed to the 140-character-limit caprices of Twitter.

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About the Blog

The SUP blog showcases new books and Press news in addition to serving as a forum for our authors—past and present—to expound on issues related to their scholarship. Views expressed by guest contributors to the blog do not necessarily represent those of Stanford University or Stanford University Press, and all guest contributions are denoted by a byline and an author bio.

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